


there's only a shadow of me (in a manner of speaking i'm dead)

by luxluminaire



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Domestic Moments, Established Relationship, F/F, Nightmares, Romance, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 06:57:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11156640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxluminaire/pseuds/luxluminaire
Summary: Lovelace and Minkowski try to readjust to life on Earth, in a world where Lovelace feels like there is no longer a place for her. AKA: how can you call a place home when your current self was born from a star eight lightyears away?





	there's only a shadow of me (in a manner of speaking i'm dead)

**Author's Note:**

> I had to get this idea out there and published before season 4 begins and inevitably disputes something about this fic (besides Lovelace and Minkowski living a domestic life together on Earth post-Hephaestus, which unfortunately will only ever exist in my head). Plus you may even notice a small reference to the bonus Lovelace flashback episode that I was able to slip in while editing.
> 
> Also, a couple of content warnings not addressed in the tags: this fic contains depictions of a panic attack and brief recreational drug usage.

Some things are the same.

Even after she leaves deep space Lovelace’s nightmares do not go away, and instead they follow her back to Earth where they torment her sleep with their usual spectrum of re-lived past events and manifestations of anxieties. When she wakes there is always that split second when she thinks that she is still on the Hephaestus before reality kicks in and she reminds herself that no, she really _did_ make it home. She is safe in her bed, her legs tangled in the blanket from thrashing in her sleep and her body coated in a thin sheen of cold sweat. Outside her bedroom window is not the ever-present light of a red-dwarf-turned-blue-dwarf star, but instead the faint glow of streetlights against the dark cover of night. The dreams may be the same, but the world she wakes up to is different, and that is what matters.

Lovelace breathes deeply--inhale, exhale, repeat--to focus herself upon the present moment. She closes her eyes and takes herself away from the cold reaches of space that haunt her dreams. _You’re okay_ , she tells herself, repeating the words in her head like a mantra with every breath. _You’re here. You made it back. You’re home_. The thoughts help to ground her, allowing her to let go of her adrenaline-filled terror one breath at at time. She is here, and she is home, and she will not let the nightmares win.

It’s 3:02 AM. The world around her is quiet, with very few cars on the road outside and no people walking by. Beside her, Minkowski is asleep. She sleeps well most nights, somehow, although sometimes when Lovelace is inevitably awake in the middle of the night she hears her whimpering in her sleep with sounds of distress that make Lovelace wonder if her dreams are equally as bad. She rubs Minkowski’s back comfortingly whenever this happens, soothing her back into untroubled sleep, and when morning comes they rarely discuss it. Both of them find it easier to avoid bringing up the old ghosts that refuse to stop haunting them.

Therefore, on most nights it is only Lovelace who lies awake and alone until morning arrives. It’s strange to think of herself as _alone_ when Minkowski is right there with her and an entire world of people lies outside the window. But none of those people know who she is, _what_ she is, and what she has endured. They don’t know the constant struggle that Lovelace faces regarding whether she truly _is_ home when her current self was spat out of a star eight light years away and the Isabel Lovelace who left Earth all those years ago is long gone. Not even Minkowski can understand the breadth of complexities that come with having to redefine herself as only a shadow of who she thought she was, a clever imitation that, no matter how physically and mentally identical she is to her original self, is still not human. She is now a stranger in a strange land, even though this place should feel like home to her, and yet most people will never know that an alien walks among them.

Minkowski is fine with that now, mostly. God knows it hasn’t been an easy adjustment for her to learn that the woman she loves is actually an alien copy of someone who has been dead for years, but Lovelace has given her all the time she needs to sort out her feelings. “You’re still you,” Minkowski had said when she was finally able to look Lovelace in the eye again after an understandable stretch of suspicion and distrust. “No matter who or what you are, you’re still the person that I fell in love with, and that’s the only thing that should matter.” Lovelace keeps these words in the back of her mind whenever she finds herself overcome by doubt about who she is, and the repetitions of _You’re still you_ , _you’re okay_ , and _you made it home_ have become the holy trinity of encouragements that she repeats to herself during the difficult moments.

Lovelace sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed to rise to her feet. The bedsprings creak with the strain of her movement against the mattress, but Minkowski does not wake. The dim light of the room, part of Lovelace’s line of defense against the terror that the night can bring her, provides her with enough visibility to maneuver safely through the space of the bedroom. She flicks on the lightswitch in the hallway and follows its light into the kitchen, her bare feet sticking against the tile of the kitchen floor as she approaches the refrigerator. The cold taste of a glass of water calms her further, and so she gulps down the liquid until her glass is empty.

She stands there in the middle of the kitchen for a lingering moment, watching the clock on the stove advance from 3:08 to 3:09. A few more hours remain until the time when Minkowski usually wakes up, and so Lovelace must figure out what to do with this time while she is awake and alone. Trying to go back to sleep is always an option, but she knows that will be a futile endeavor. She is too awake now, too conscious of the possibility of future nightmares. By now she is an expert in filling sleepless hours with something other than lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and so that is how she ends up sliding her feet into a pair of shoes and stepping out the back door of the house into the cool night air.

Fresh air was something that she could never get on the Hephaestus, with all of the oxygen on the station being manufactured and recycled day after day. The closest thing was those times during her first mission when she would go on a spacewalk, turn off her mag gear, and just _float_ while safely tethered to the station. Upon her return to Earth she’d almost forgotten how it feels to experience the brush of a fresh breeze against her skin--although, she supposes, this alien body had never felt it before in the first place. The familiar nightmares may continue to haunt her even after she has left the Hephaestus, but now at least she is able to step out into the dark, quiet space of the nighttime air that brings a fleeting sense of calm to her. The waking world borders upon too much for her sometimes, but the slumbering world of three A.M. provides a much more inviting space.

Lovelace sits down in the middle of the patch of grass that forms the backyard. Above her, the sky stretches outward in infinite blackness, dotted by the faint lights of stars. The empty void of deep space should be her home, in a manner of speaking, but she feels no homesickness for the star from which her current body had been born. Wolf 359 and everything surrounding it can burn forever for all she cares. No matter how many friends she has made on the Hephaestus, no matter how lucky she is to have found love with Minkowski in the face of every obstacle they have had to endure, she refuses to accept that place as home. _This_ is home, Earth, with its solid ground and broad skies. If only Lovelace felt like she still had a place here.

She has distanced herself from everyone from her old life since her return. Her family, her friends, everyone who she left behind when she first went to deep space, have all believed her to be dead for years. As much of a relief it would be for them to learn that she is alive, Lovelace does not want to deal the complications that come with explaining the circumstances of her return. How can she even _face_ her family when she is not the version of herself that they last saw? She has changed not only on a metaphorical level in how deeply her time on the Hephaestus has affected her mental state, but also on a literal level because the reports _weren’t_ wrong when they declared her dead years ago. An empty grave with her name on it probably exists somewhere, and yet here she is, not returned from the dead but returned as something else. Would it truly give peace to everyone who has previously known her to find out what she is now? It’s not a question that Lovelace is sure she wants to know the answer to, and it leaves her feeling increasingly out of place in a world that for the most part has no idea that aliens exist outside of science fiction.

Lovelace looks up at the wide expanse of the sky above her. The tiny pulse of a light traveling across the blackness indicates the path of an airplane in its late night flight. From its perspective miles up in the sky, Lovelace’s presence sitting in her backyard in the middle of the night is completely invisible, obscured by the sheer distance that separates the two. And to someone lightyears away on one of the deep space outposts, the entire Earth itself is nothing more than a tiny blip on the radar, something that can barely be seen even with the aid of a powerful telescope and the perfect alignment of orbits. There’s nothing like contemplating the sheer size of the known universe to make Lovelace feel insignificant, and with it comes a rising sense of overwhelm. It’s too much for her to think about, pondering her place in the universe when she cannot even determine her place on Earth anymore, and so she forcefully pushes these thoughts out of her mind before they tip her over into the heart-pounding territory of fear and anxiety.

She is no stranger to fear, if she is being honest with herself. As much as she has tried to present herself as a woman with no fear, someone who confronts everything head-on and worries about the consequences later, that does not stop fear from lurking deep within her at any given moment. On the Hephaestus she had reached a point when she had acted out of nothing but fear and paranoia, mustering up all of her self-preservation to keep herself alive for one more day and fight against those dual emotions that haunt her. Her life has become a constant battle on that front, trying to regain ground when it comes to who she used to be. It’s a losing battle most of the time. She has been too profoundly changed by her time on the Hephaestus, and perhaps the old version of Isabel Lovelace had already died, too broken by her fear, even before she fell into the star.

But that does not stop her from fighting against it. It does not stop her from standing in the face of what terrifies her and saying “Fuck you.” Fuck fear, and fuck nightmares, and fuck anything that stands in her way. She will not let them win. She _can’t_. If she is strong enough to make it through everything that she has endured, then she is strong enough to push back against any emotion that tries to overwhelm her. She _will_ move forward and find a place for her here on Earth, because no matter how much of a hurdle it is for her to jump over, no matter how much it terrifies her, she _has_ to do it if she wants to continue to survive.

Lovelace stands up and returns inside the house, closing and locking the back door behind her. She steps out of her shoes and proceeds through the kitchen and hallway to reach her bedroom. Minkowski is still asleep, with the dim light of the room revealing her slumbering form. After Lovelace has climbed into bed and tucked the blankets warmly around her, she watches Minkowski and listens to the quiet sound of her sleeping breaths. The sound soothes her in a gentle encouragement to accompany her fierce determination to overcome the fear that night brings her.

She leans forward to kiss the top of Minkowski’s head, her nose pressing into her hair at the gesture. Minkowski shifts slightly in her sleep, but she does not wake up. Her lips are set into a slight frown, and the movement of her eyes beneath her closed eyelids indicates that she is dreaming. Not bad dreams, Lovelace hopes. One set of nightmares per night is more than enough for the two of them.

Lovelace settles herself more comfortably under the covers and closes her eyes. For all of the contemplation and self-examination that she has done since waking, acknowledging what terrifies her and staring those fears in the eye, she does not feel a sense of calm or relaxation that will send her off to sleep. Her mind instead continues to race in a thousand different directions, none of them heading toward slumber, and thus she finds herself facing the interminable sleepless hours that remain until morning--same as it ever was.

 

* * *

 

Other things, however, are different.

There was never such a thing as a lazy weekend morning on the Hephaestus. Whether Lovelace was the commanding officer of the station, an object of suspicion, or a member of the crew, she always had _something_ to do at the start of each of her days: leading her people, building a shuttle, repairing the station, plotting a mutiny. She could not afford to spend valuable time lounging around in bed, prolonging the moment when she finally got up to face the day. Now, however, she has days when she _can_ lie warm and cozy in bed with no obligations to worry about, no problems to fix, and no life-or-death situations to deal with. Even when she has not slept through the night, she treasures these mornings when she can watch Minkowski wake up, yawning and bleary-eyed, and persuade her to stay in bed a little longer with a gentle good morning kiss.

“I have to--” Minkowski begins, but Lovelace cuts her off with another kiss.

“No, you don’t,” she says. “Stay here with me. Just for a little longer.”

Any of Minkowski’s further objections die away into a quiet sound of contentment against Lovelace’s lips. She brushes a hand against Lovelace’s cheek in a tender motion before kissing her again. No matter how many mornings they have spent together, the novelty of being together like this has not yet worn off. The junction of their mouths and the close press of their bodies remind them that, if nothing else, they still have each other.

The other advantage to lazy weekend mornings here on Earth is that gravity keeps Lovelace and Minkowski anchored in place to the bed so that they do not have to worry about floating across the room if they make a sudden movement or brush against the other a little too hard. On the Hephaestus, every movement that they made had to account for the lack of gravity, and that especially held true for their intimate moments. Lovelace has become well-versed in the adventure that is sex in a zero-gravity environment, but she does not miss the constant care that she has to take to avoid floating away from her partner. Instead, she now has the warmth of Minkowski’s body against her under the covers, her hands skimming across Lovelace’s skin and absently passing across one of her breasts. Her touch is an invitation, a wordless indicator of her desire for further intimacy, and so Lovelace responds with a deepened kiss as Minkowski’s hand works its way under her shirt.

“Hell of a wake-up call,” Lovelace murmurs, the sound of her words half-buried behind her shirt when she pulls it over her head. They’re doing this now, she supposes, their lazy morning kisses turned into lazy morning sex, and she has no intention of stopping the progression. Their clothes continue to come off, neither of them caring that they haven’t showered yet, and with Minkowski’s mouth against her breasts Lovelace exhales and feels more awake than she has all morning.

Flashes of memory enter her mind at the now-familiar give and take of their intimacy. She will never forget the first time she and Minkowski had slept together after coming back to Earth, seeing Minkowski lying back on the bed without having to hold onto anything to keep her steady and admiring how the pull of gravity affects the shape of her breasts in her reclined position. It’s one of those little details she never thought she’d appreciate until she found herself in that moment, re-acquainting herself with how to fuck a woman under the constraints of gravity. On the Hephaestus there hadn’t been much opportunity for variety in positioning and actions, not unless they wanted to spend more time carefully choreographing their movements to avoid any mood-ruining mishaps. But with the added limitations of gravity comes the creativity of form, and so they’d been quick to experiment with positions and acts that had seemed nigh impossible when they had to cling desperately to each other and the wall to maintain the delicate balance of their bodies. It had been like their first time in bed together all over again, except instead of a quick reprieve in the landscape of a hellhole space station there were hours of on-and-off sex--them trying to find meaning in their new life on Earth together through the brush of skin against skin, their bodies an ouroboros as they intertwine in their mutual pleasure.

As the warm morning light passes through the window and onto their bed, however, simplicity is the name of the game. They choose to take comfort in the familiar, and Lovelace’s hand knows its way down Minkowski’s body and between her legs like second nature by this point. The small gasp of breath that Minkowski gives at Lovelace’s touch against her clit, the moaning of her name as Lovelace kisses every inch of her skin--Lovelace knows it all by now. When Minkowski eventually comes with two of Lovelace’s fingers curled inside her, she is beautiful. Lovelace never tires of seeing her like this, her hair spilling loose across the pillow and her face flushed with pleasure. It’s almost enough to make Lovelace forget about the nightmares that refuse to stop surfacing in her mind.

She shifts position to lie beside Minkowski, sucking her fingers clean as Minkowski relaxes in the afterglow of orgasm. It’s not long before she feels the brush of Minkowski’s lips against her bare shoulder. Lovelace sinks easily into the reciprocation of her earlier actions, breathing out words of encouragement as Minkowski’s touch moves further downward. The warmth of arousal that pools within her grows larger with each exhale until she is left with nothing but a moan of “Oh, God, Renée, please.”

Minkowski buries her face into the hollow of Lovelace’s neck as her hand moves against her down below. The press of her mouth against sensitive skin is not the sharp graze of teeth that comes with some of their rougher and more desperate encounters, but instead it is the softer brush of her lips and tongue across the base of her throat in time with the movement of her fingers. Minkowski approaches sex with the same care and efficiency that she does any other task, and so it is not long before the pleasure that fills Lovelace reaches its plateau. She teeters at the brink before everything spills over into the ecstasy of orgasm. Her body pulses, her breathing slows, and her eyes close as she takes in the all-consuming feeling of pure satisfaction.

When Lovelace opens her eyes again, Minkowski lies beside her. Their lips meet in a brief kiss, and their foreheads press together as they savor this last moment of morning closeness before they get up. Lovelace reaches out to brush a few wayward strands of Minkowski’s hair away from her face. Her touch lingers against her cheek before she pulls it away.

“Hey,” she murmurs.

“Hey,” Minkowski echoes her. “Good morning.”

“Good” is not a word that Lovelace often uses to describe her mornings, which do nothing but mark the passing of yet another sleepless night. Sex before eight A.M. is definitely a welcome start to the day, though, and it tips the scale closer to the category of “good” with each passing moment that she and Minkowski spend lingering in bed. They have to get out of bed sometime, however, and when that time arrives Minkowski is the first of them to do so. She pulls on the T-shirt and shorts that she has slept in, leaving little time for Lovelace to admire the form of her body before she heads into the bathroom.

Lovelace is not far behind her, yawning widely as she gathers up her discarded clothing. She has few qualms about being not fully dressed in her own home, and so she only wears a tank top and underwear when she walks into the kitchen. The promise of a morning dose of caffeine drives her as she fires up the coffee maker. She paces impatiently around the kitchen while she waits for the coffee to brew, planning out what she will make for breakfast later. Bacon and eggs, maybe--something filling that will get her through whatever today has in store for her. Even if her current life on Earth is much more slower-paced than it had been on the Hephaestus, each day always brings _something_ for her to deal with, usually on a purely emotional level.

After Lovelace has finished making the coffee, she heads for the bathroom just in time to hear Minkowski turning the shower off. The air is heavy with the steam that has risen from the warm water, which fogs the mirror and carries the clean, fresh scent of the soap that Minkowski has used. When Minkowski reaches around the shower curtain to reach for her towel, Lovelace is there to hand it to her.

“There’s a pot of coffee in the kitchen when you’re ready for it,” Lovelace says.

Minkowski’s brief words of thanks are buried inside her towel as she rubs it across her face and through her hair. After Minkowski has vacated the shower, Lovelace takes her place inside its narrow space. Water continues to drip in interspersed droplets from the shower head, which turns into a steady stream when she turns the water on. Minkowski has left some hot water for her, and its warmth splashes against Lovelace’s skin as she settles into her showering routine.

She lets the water run down her body, each drop leaving trails across her skin that mingle with the soap that she has lathered. With every stream of water that drips off her body, she imagines the night washing away as she prepares herself to face a new day. All of last night’s worries are gone now, and now she can start fresh. It’s not a foolproof line of thought, because some things don’t wash away so easily, but the image comforts her.

The water pools at the drain at the bottom of the shower. Lovelace watches it sink downward into the pipes and through the plumbing, and by the time the last of the water has ebbed away, she has braced herself to face the enormity of the day that stretches ahead of her.

 

* * *

 

Lovelace has always been a city person at heart, drawing energy from the hustle and bustle of the people who inhabit the crowded streets of urban centers. But something has changed within her after her time on the Hephaestus, and years of having only the same handful of people for company has left her overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who now surround her on Earth. City life no longer agrees with her, as it turns out, and so instead she has chosen to make the relatively quieter space of suburbia her new home. Even then, she cannot shake the feeling that everyone is staring at her when she walks by and that they _know_ that she is not like the rest of them. She is no stranger to having suspicious and judgmental eyes upon her--because of the color of her skin, because she dares to show affection to her girlfriends in public--but this is different. There are no outward signs that mark her as anything but human to those around her. No one should even _suspect_ that she is an alien, and yet that paranoid feeling lingers whenever Lovelace leaves her house, making her hyper-alert during even the most mundane outings.

Having Minkowski with her when she goes out helps, as much as she hates to rely on someone else to stay sane. She still isn’t used to how domestic she feels when she and Minkowski head out later that morning to go grocery shopping together, with Lovelace behind the wheel of the beat-up used car that she’d bought for cheap. Driving is less stressful than she has anticipated after years of having to fly space stations and homemade shuttles, even when Minkowski is sitting in the passenger seat as her co-pilot. Minkowski is a terrible backseat driver, as it turns out, unafraid to make a comment whenever Lovelace drives more than five miles per hour over the speed limit or rolls through a stop sign at a deserted intersection, and so Lovelace tries her best to obey the minutiae of traffic laws whenever she is in the car with her.

The supermarket stands as part of a plaza lined with stripmall storefronts, its parking lot filled with cars and shopping cart corrals. Even during the short walk from the car to the automatic doors and the air-conditioned space of the store, Lovelace feels the eyes of other people upon her. There’s the inevitable rationalization about it, that these people aren’t necessarily looking _at_ her but instead past her, through her, too focused on their own shopping to care. No amount of rationalization, however, can stop her from thinking that she and Minkowski are one step away from a sensationalized news headline if someone figures out the truth: _Local Woman and Her Alien Girlfriend Go Grocery Shopping: You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!_

A familiar sense of unfocused dread fills her as she and Minkowski make their way up and down the aisles. Lovelace finds it oddly soothing to check items off Minkowski’s carefully compiled grocery list as she adds them to the cart, but that does not stop her brain from telling the rest of her body that something is about to go wrong. Her heart races with fabricated nervous anticipation that clamps around her innards like a vise. She tightens her grip against the handle of the shopping cart in an attempt to ground herself to what is present and real. _You’re okay,_ she tells herself. _You’re okay, and you’re safe, and nothing bad is going to happen._

Some things she cannot push through with the sheer will of brute force, however, and overwhelming panic is one of them. She is standing in the produce section when the delicate balance of her mental state tips over into the territory of “too much”: the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights too bright, the tangle of voices from the people around her too loud, the beat of her heart too frantic. Minkowski is trying to get her attention, and the sound of her voice saying “Isabel… Isabel…” is a distant, distorted echo. The only response that Lovelace can manage is a shaky breath as the display of apples in front of her blurs before her eyes, phasing in and out of her focus.

“Are you okay?” Minkowski continues on.

“I need some air,” says Lovelace once she has found her voice. “I’m going to wait out in the car while you finish up.”

Minkowski does not question her. Lovelace lets go of her grip on the handle of the shopping cart and walks away, forcing herself to shut out everything around her as she makes her way through the aisles and past the lines of cash registers. She moves as fast as her feet can carry her without breaking into a full run, and when she steps out into the parking lot she barely stops for a car driving past the front of the store. The angry sound of a car horn breaks through the air, but Lovelace pays it no mind. Her only focus is upon getting away from everything and finding a place where she does not feel the eyes of others upon her.

When she reaches her car, she fumbles to find her keys and unlocks the door so that she can shut herself inside the confined space. She takes gulping breaths of air as if she has previously been drowning, her chest aching and her body trembling. She rests her forehead against the top of the steering wheel, closing her eyes and forcing herself to breathe deeply. With each inhale and exhale, she reminds herself that she is safe and that this moment will pass. Time slips away from her, seconds stretching out into minutes as her heart rate slows down and the rush of her anxious feelings fades away. A vague sense of frustration is left in their absence, along with the desperate question of when all of this will stop. When will she be able to go out and run a simple errand without the fear of breaking down? When will she fully feel like herself again and not the pale imitation of someone who should have been dead and gone years ago? These questions do not have simple answers, if they even have answers at all, and that lack of a light at the end of the tunnel frustrates her more than ever.

The eventual sound of an opening car door startles her. Lovelace lifts her head to see Minkowski unloading the cart full of bagged groceries into the back seat of the car. Minkowski does not speak until she has returned the cart and opens the door to slide into the passenger seat. A brief moment of hesitation passes between them before Minkowski touches a hand to her shoulder.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Fine,” Lovelace replies in the standard lie that makes everything easier. “Everything was just… It was too much, right then. I needed to get away.”

Minkowski makes a murmur of sympathy. Moments like these have been common for both of them since their return to Earth, when they find themselves freezing up or breaking down at sometimes the smallest of provocations. A few days ago it had been Minkowski in this position, when they’d been watching TV and there’d been a piece of music--something either the same as or just similar enough to one of the musical transmissions received on the Hephaestus--that had made Minkowski go pale and tell Lovelace in a small voice to turn off the TV. They’d sat in silence after that, with Lovelace giving her all of the space she needed to come back into herself, although when Minkowski had taken hold of her hand Lovelace was sure to squeeze it tightly in reassurance.

“Do you mind driving home?” Lovelace asks.

When Minkowski does not object, Lovelace gives her the keys and gets out of the car so that they can switch positions. Minkowski is the model of a perfect driver as they pull out of the parking lot and onto the road, with her hands positioned at ten and two on the steering wheel and her uncanny ability to always drive at the exact speed limit. It’s certainly enough to make Lovelace feel infinitely safer than if she herself were behind the wheel in her current state.

The drive home passes by in silence except for the quiet sound of the radio playing a series of generic pop tunes. Lovelace stares out the window, watching the suburban scenery go by. While they wait at a traffic light, a car in front of them has a bumper sticker that features a standard cartoonish image of an alien and the words “I Believe.” Lovelace almost laughs at that, at how _clueless_ that driver is to how a real, live alien sits in the car right behind them, someone who does not have the green skin or bug eyes that define the image of the archetypical alien but still comes from a distant star bearing the face and memories of the person whom Isabel Lovelace once was. For her, the existence of aliens is not a conspiracy theory or wishful thinking, but rather a personal existential crisis that refuses to go away.

Minkowski pulls into the short length of driveway in front of their house. She turns the key in the ignition to shut off the engine, but instead of immediately getting out of the car she remains in the driver’s seat. A preparatory exhale of breath serves as a prelude to her words.

“Do you think… Do you think we should talk to somebody?” she says.

“About what?” replies Lovelace, but she knows fully well what Minkowski means. The thought has occurred to her as well, that maybe everything that they have been through is too much for them to handle on their own. They can only maintain the veneer of normalcy for so long before everything tumbles down around them.

“About this.” Minkowski gestures vaguely. “About how neither of us can go more than a handful of days without something becoming too much. We can’t keep on pretending that everything that happened to us on the Hephaestus hasn’t followed us home.”

Lovelace gives a humorless scoff of laughter. “What would we even say?” she asks. “What could _I_ say about everything that happened, about what I _am_ , without sounding like I’m delusional?”

“But it can’t be just... _that_ ,” says Minkowski. Her response does the familiar tiptoeing dance around the dreaded “a” word. “I’m sure there’s a way to talk about what happened without--”

“Is there, though?” Lovelace cuts her off. “Maybe before I came back to the Hephaestus, back when I was…” She trails off there, unsure of how she should finish that statement. Back when she was still human? When she was still fully herself? “I mean, what am I going to do? Walk into a therapist’s office and talk about how I spent longer than anyone should ever have to spend in deep space, fell into a star and died, came back as an alien who had no idea I _was_ an alien until I died _again_ , and now I’m back on Earth and sometimes feel like there isn’t a place for me here anymore? Do you think all of that is even _remotely_ close to something that the average mental health professional knows how to deal with?”

Minkowski frowns, her lips forming a thin line of grimness. “No,” she says. “I suppose it isn’t.”

Beyond her frown, Lovelace sees the concern in Minkowski’s eyes and the worry that her reluctance to address an issue is not like her at all. Her concern is not unfounded. Usually Lovelace does not hesitate to tackle the problems that she faces head-on, refusing to hide from them and pretend that they do not exist. Her current fears and anxieties are something that she could not hide from even if she tried, and so it is not the existence of her struggles that gives her pause, but rather the nature of them. They are more enormous and abstract than something like being trapped on a space station or addressing interpersonal issues between crew members. Those types of problems have concrete solutions and a clear path that she can take to solve them. Confronting herself and her own existence is a much more daunting task, one that she cannot always force her way through with determination and stubbornness, and it leaves her at a loss.

“We should bring the groceries inside,” is all she says in response to Minkowski.

They unload the bags of groceries from the back of the car with no further words exchanged between them. In the absence of words is the insidious creeping of silent tension, the uncertainty of whether something wrong has been said or that a line has been crossed. As they empty each bag of groceries and place the contents into the cupboards, the refrigerator, the freezer, Lovelace senses the glances that Minkowski casts her her direction, as if Minkowski is waiting for her to continue the conversation they had begun in the parked car. There is nothing more for Lovelace to say, however. Any further discussion of the matter will only lead her to more difficult thoughts that she cannot properly articulate.

After everything has been put away, Minkowski stands in the middle of the kitchen, regarding Lovelace with a continued sense of wanting to say something but not necessarily having the words. “I’m sorry,” she finally says. “I--I wasn’t really thinking about how much more complicated all of this is for you. I completely understand why you don’t want to bring another person into this, even a doctor or therapist or anyone like that. I just… Well, it was something I wanted to put on the table.”

“It’s okay,” replies Lovelace. She tries to let the genuine sentiment of her words shine through, lest her response carry the connotation of “I’m saying that things are okay, but they’re really not.” _She_ may not be okay, but she does not hold any anger or frustration toward Minkowski for her tentative suggestion.

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk to each other,” says Minkowski. “I know the past several months have been… They’ve been a lot. For both of us. And sometimes I feel like I haven’t been there for you as much as I should. To… help you through this, I suppose. I’ve spent so much time thinking about what I’ve been going through myself, and--”

Lovelace closes the distance between them and pulls Minkowski into the comforting hold of an embrace. “You’ve done enough,” she assures her before she can say anything else. “And neither of us needs to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves for what we have or haven’t done. I may have no idea how the hell to handle all of this, but as long as you’re with me, it’s enough.”

“Okay.” Minkowski’s words of relief are muffled into Lovelace’s shoulder. “That makes two of us, then.”

Lovelace allows herself a quiet breath of laughter, not because there’s anything particularly funny about the situation, but because it’s reassuring to know that no matter how isolated she often feels, she is not alone. Even though she has not found the light at the end of the tunnel yet when it comes to returning to something even remotely resembling a normal life, she still has someone with whom she can stumble through the darkness. They will find a way to make it through. Lovelace isn’t sure how they will do so, or how long it will take, but maybe one day everything will stop being too much for them.

She withdraws from their embrace and squeezes Minkowski’s hand in a final gesture of reassurance, both for Minkowski’s sake and her own, and for now, she can believe that everything will eventually be all right.

 

* * *

 

If each of Lovelace’s mornings mark the passage of another restless night, then each evening heralds the imminent arrival of a new stretch of several hours plagued by sleeplessness and nightmares. She has settled into an evening routine by now: going for a run sometime before the sun goes down, taking turns with Minkowski to make dinner, and then kicking back and watching TV or a movie for a few hours. Having at least some semblance of a routine for the last part of her day helps her approach the nighttime hours with a sense of control, although how long she lasts before that control begins to unravel is the big question that she faces every night. As long as she can keep the nightmares away, she will be fine, but it has been a very long time since her dreams have not woken her in the night, whether one or several hours after she has fallen asleep.

There’s a certain amount of escapism to be found in watching TV, cozied up on the couch with one arm ending up draped casually across Minkowski’s shoulders by the end of the night. The two of them have become very set in their ways in their television taste by now: old sitcom and procedural reruns, documentaries, and the occasional not entirely sordid reality show. They have been on a cooking competition binge lately, something that provides a sufficient amount of excitement and tension while ultimately being low-stakes. Getting invested in the outcome of the competition and yelling at the TV screen when she doesn’t agree with the results makes Lovelace feel almost normal, like she has gone back to her life before everything went wrong.

“Oh, come on, that’s bullshit!” she exclaims. “He should _not_ have won that. That dessert presentation was godawful compared to the others.”

“Yeah, but he also had the best appetizer and entree,” Minkowski points out. “And definitely the edge when it came to taste. Your favorites can’t always win, you know.”

“Hey, like _you_ weren’t the one yelling at the TV last episode with that one guy who was completely incompetent. I think both of us have lost the right to make fun of each other for getting too invested in cooking shows.”

“All right, you have a point there,” says Minkowski with a sigh of concession. She reaches for the TV remote. “What do you think? One more episode before bed?”

“Yeah. I think I’m going to step outside for a bit first, though. Don’t start the next episode until I come back.”

“Stepping outside” is Lovelace’s succinct way of saying that she has had a long day and needs a smoke. She tries not to make a habit out of self-medicating with weed, but sometimes at the end of a particularly difficult day she needs the calmness that she gets from a high. One of her ex-girlfriends, from over a decade ago now, used to tease her by saying that the only time she ever has an ounce of chill is when she’s high. Although Lovelace had denied it back then, there’s a certain amount of truth to it now. It’s nowhere near a foolproof method for calming her mind before she goes to sleep, but it does soften the edges of her world just enough to lessen the weight that she feels upon her.

She goes out into the small patch of backyard and lights up. Minkowski doesn’t smoke, weed or otherwise, and so out of respect for her Lovelace rarely smokes in the house. She prefers being outside anyway, watching the smoke dissipate into the air around her with each breath that she exhales. It’s the same reason why she’d been in this exact spot almost twenty hours previously. Something about being outside in the fresh air brings her that extra level of comfort when she is seeking a reprieve from everything that troubles her.

She paces in small circles outside the back door while her free hand absently plays with her lighter, flicking its flame on and off. The world of ten-thirty P.M. is much less lonelier than the world of three A.M. The faint glow of lamplight emanates from the houses on either side of her, and the surrounding roads hum with the passing of cars filled with people returning home from work or coming or going from a night out. Above her, the night sky stretches dark and wide, but its breadth does not terrify Lovelace quite as much now. In this moment, the tiny pinpricks of light that each represent a distant star are beautiful to her. The inevitable sense of cosmic insignificance that fills her at the sight does not threaten to overwhelm her. It does not give her that elusive place in the universe that she has been searching for since her return to Earth, but instead she faces it with a quiet acceptance. She is here, and she was once out there, and that is the only thing that is important right now.

The last puff of smoke that Lovelace breathes out disappears into the nighttime air as she savors the immediate effects of the final hit that she has taken. She gathers herself and returns inside, leaving her shoes at the door before passing through the kitchen and returning to the living room. As she rejoins Minkowski on the couch, Minkowski regards her with the familiar look of being unsure whether she should broach a subject. Her occasional bouts of uncertainty frustrate Lovelace to no end sometimes, when she has to watch Minkowski open her mouth and then close it again with a frown as she reconsiders whatever she has to say. Normally Lovelace would prompt her to just spit out whatever she has on her mind, but right now most of her impatience has been stripped away in the wake of her high.

“Are you doing better after earlier today?” Minkowski finally asks her.

“I’m fine.” It’s the same lie that Lovelace had told her in the supermarket parking lot, an easy response that tries to avoid the complications of honesty even though she knows that Minkowski will see right through her.

The expression of inquiring concern does not leave Minkowski’s face. “Yeah, but we both know that you don’t usually get high when you’ve been having a good day. So are you doing better?”

Lovelace sighs. “I mean, ‘better’ is a relative term, isn’t it?” she says. “Am I on the verge of a panic attack? No. Am I going to be able to make it through tonight without having a nightmare or some kind of existential crisis? Jury’s still out on that one.”

“Is there anything I can do? I know you said that me being here is enough, but…”

Minkowski trails off there. Her words carry the same tone as they did when she’d stood in the kitchen several hours ago and reminded her that they can always tell each other about what is troubling them. Lovelace likes to think of herself as someone who is good at communication and not letting unspoken issues fester between her and Minkowski, but everything connected to their experiences on the Hephaestus is _different_. Usually she’d take talking through half a dozen petty disagreements, as infuriating as they are, over trying to articulate her complicated thoughts enough for Minkowski to help her. Right now, however, those thoughts drift to the forefront of her mind in unusual clarity, and so Lovelace lets them flow forth.

“You can put on the next episode and we can keep yelling at the chefs and judges,” she says. At Minkowski’s raised eyebrows, she adds, “Look, sitting here watching TV with you makes me feel… more normal, I guess. Like I’m not going to go outside and--and have everyone be like ‘Oh my God, I think that woman is actually an alien.’ I know it’s stupid and makes absolutely no sense. I know that if even _I_ didn’t realize what I really am for over a year, there’s no way that anyone out there will.” She gestures toward the window and the dark world outside. “But that’s what it’s been like for me ever since we came back, and sometimes--all of the time--I just want to forget about all of that. By being with you, and by watching dumb TV together.”

At the word “alien,” Minkowski gives her usual flinch, a barely perceptible movement in response to Lovelace’s blunt acknowledgement of what she is. Lovelace knows that she does not react out of revulsion--they’ve had that conversation before, months ago--but rather a reluctance to acknowledge Lovelace as anything other than the person whom she loves. That line of thinking comforts her in a strange way, and with it comes the reassuring echo of _You’re still the person I fell in love with_. It doesn’t matter what Lovelace is or was, as long as she is still _her_ in Minkowski’s eyes.

“Okay,” is all Minkowski says in response to her. She exhales a quiet breath. “I can do that.”

She reaches for the remote so that they can start the next episode. Lovelace snuggles up against her, resting her head in her lap and feeling more at peace than she has all day. As the episode progresses, Minkowski’s comments grow sparser and sleepier until Lovelace says something expecting a response from her and never hears one. She glances up at her and sees her dozing, leaning against the arm of the couch. A fond smile breaks across Lovelace’s expression at the sight. She will gently tease Minkowski about this later, how she couldn’t even stay up to watch the dessert round, but for now she lets her sleep for these last fifteen minutes.

After the episode is over, Lovelace turns off the TV and gently nudges Minkowski awake. “Hey,” she says after Minkowski has blearily opened her eyes. “Time for bed?”

Minkowski murmurs in agreement. She stretches her limbs long before standing up from the couch. “Are you coming too?” she asks.

“In a bit.” When insomnia and nightmares have been her constant companions for years, Lovelace finds little need to stick to a somewhat strict bedtime like Minkowski has done since their return to Earth. Instead, she tends to fill the hours after Minkowski has gone to bed with activity, from the mindless entertainment of more TV or a movie to the productivity of chores like late-night loads of laundry. Tonight, however, is a rare night when her mental exhaustion matches her physical exhaustion, and so she will at least try to go to bed at a reasonable hour. “I’ll be in before you fall asleep.”

Minkowski takes the empty glass of wine that sits on the nearby table--her own substance of choice for evening relaxation--and departs from the room. Lovelace does not rise from the couch until after she has heard her rinse the glass at the kitchen sink, followed by the echoing sound of her footsteps toward the bedroom. By the time Lovelace has turned off most of the lights and locked up the house, Minkowski is already settled into bed, tucked comfortably under the covers with a book in her hand. Her attentiveness and alertness is already fading fast, judging by the slack hold that she has on her book as she lies reading.

“Isabel?” Minkowski calls to her as Lovelace stands in the bathroom brushing her teeth after putting on her pajamas. The mindless task has left her lost in thought, staring at the very human face that looks back at her in the mirror.

Lovelace spits into the sink before responding. “Yeah?”

“Can you go in the kitchen and turn on the dishwasher? I forgot to do it while I was in there.”

Lovelace holds her toothbrush between her teeth as she leaves the bathroom to walk to the kitchen. The dark space that she had passed through only a few minutes earlier feels unfamiliar in the absence of light, and the shadows make her jump at the sight of things that she knows aren’t there. There’s nothing there in the dark that is not there in the light, she tells herself in words that play themselves in her head in a familiar echo. Where had she heard those words before? It takes her a moment to place them as she flips on the lightswitch. She remembers their source once lamplight has flooded the kitchen: they were Hilbert’s words, _Selberg’s_ words, during her first mission on the Hephaestus when they’d had to traverse through the station in the dark to restore power during a major outage. It feels like a lifetime ago that he’d said that to her--and it actually _was_ a lifetime ago for her, technically speaking. Both people from that conversation are dead now, and only one of them has been lucky (or unlucky) enough to come back as something else.

After Lovelace has started the dishwasher, she leaves the kitchen behind in darkness. The light from the bathroom casts strange shadows against the wall as she walks through the hallway, the distorted shape of a person with the thin stick of a toothbrush handle hanging out of her mouth. The sight brings her a brief breath of laughter. It’s always good to be able to laugh in the face of darkness, like the jokes that she sometimes tells herself during times of stress. It makes her feel a little more prepared to face the inevitable nightmares.

She finishes brushing her teeth and returns to the bedroom. Minkowski lies on her side, her eyes closed and her book resting on the bed with a finger marking her place. At first Lovelace fears that she has fallen asleep before they could share a proper goodnight, but when she lies down and settles herself under the blanket Minkowski shifts with half-asleep but still vaguely alert movements to set her book on the bedside table.

“Goodnight,” says Minkowski, rolling over to face Lovelace. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” Lovelace replies. She leans forward to kiss her. “Goodnight.”

Within a few minutes, Minkowski’s breathing fades into the calm rhythm of sleeping breaths. Lovelace snuggles closer to her, feeling the warmth of her body against hers, but even after she closes her eyes and lets the world around her go dark, she does not join her in slumber until a long time after.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes Lovelace’s nights do not consist entirely of nightmares. She classifies her nightmares as usually following some kind of narrative, whether it is based upon her past experiences or an entirely fabricated scenario. Other times, however, her dreams are nothing more than flashes, vague images and feelings that hold no inherent meaning but still cause her to wake with a lingering sense of anxiety. She hasn’t yet determined which variety of dreams is worse. Both of them leave her awake and restless and longing to just _once_ have a night of completely dreamless sleep. Or even a night of _good_ dreams, but that is probably too much to ask for at the moment.

Lovelace’s dreams fall into the latter of the two categories that night as she drifts in and out of sleep, waking every hour unable to recall much about her sleeping thoughts apart from a pressing sense of dread. When she wakes up for the--fourth? fifth? who the hell can keep track?--time, she remains awake. Her mind moves too quickly to fall back asleep, and so she soon accepts that this pre-dawn hour of five A.M. will be her wake-up time for the day. The sky outside the window has lightened with the first signs of morning, and the occasional sound of a car driving by signifies the people who are getting an early start to their day. Lovelace _could_ join them in doing something productive now that she is awake, in contrast to the lazy morning that she’d had yesterday, but instead there is only the soft glow of the phone screen in her hand as she scrolls through yesterday’s news story highlights.

Beside her, Minkowski mumbles something in her sleep. It’s not unusual for Lovelace to catch her in a bout of sleep talking every now and then, uttering words that are often incoherent and not always in English. The murmur that leaves her lips this time borders more closely upon a whimper of distress. The sound is so helpless, so vulnerable, that it makes Lovelace’s heart ache to think about the dream that Minkowski must be having.

Before she can touch a comforting hand to her sleeping form, Minkowski’s body thrashes, tossing and turning with restless movements. Her eyes snap open, and her breaths come fast with the adrenaline of waking from a nightmare. Lovelace is intimately familiar with the wide-eyed terror that she sees upon Minkowski’s face, that feeling after you wake and cannot determine whether you are still dreaming and what is real. She reaches out to touch Minkowski’s arm, ready to give her the reassurance that Lovelace herself so often craves after waking from one of her own nightmares.

“It’s okay,” she says, rubbing her shoulder gently. “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re safe.”

The fear in Minkowski’s expression relaxes. She buries her face into Lovelace’s chest, and Lovelace holds her close, listening to the gradual slowing of her breaths with each exhale. Lovelace gives her all the time that she needs to calm down and let the terror fade away into the comforting presence of reality before she speaks again.

“Bad dreams?” she asks.

Minkowski lifts her head. “Yeah,” she replies. The single word sounds frustrated, even angry. Lovelace has known her long enough to understand the source of these emotions. Minkowski is someone who is always concerned about being in control of her situation and her surroundings, and there’s nothing like a bad dream to create a sense of loss of control.

“Tell me about them,” says Lovelace.

Minkowski rolls onto her back. She rubs the heels of her hands across her eyes, as if the motion helps her recall the details that threaten to float away from her mind. “I was… I was back on the Hephaestus,” she begins. “Or… outside the Hephaestus, I guess. Doing a spacewalk. You were there too. We were probably working on maintenance together, I’m not really sure. But at some point your mag gear malfunctioned, and you floated off the structure. And you weren’t tethered because--God, I don’t know, you just _weren’t_ , because of course everything that could go wrong was going wrong. So I was calling you on the comms, trying to direct you back on a course toward the station, and then I suddenly realized I had a propulsion maneuvering unit that I could use to get to you. Except I went to power it on and it was out of fuel, and then I tried to talk to Hera inside the station to see if she could do anything to adjust our course to get closer to you, but she wasn’t responding, and….”

She breaks off there, her voice catching with her last words. Lovelace touches her arm in a reassuring motion, her fingers brushing against her skin in quiet encouragement.

“You were falling into the star,” Minkowski continues on. “And there was nothing I could do. It happened so fast too. You were drifting toward the star faster than should have even been possible. And before I knew it the star had swallowed you up, and that was when I woke up.”

A sense of inescapable familiarity fills Lovelace as she listens to Minkowski recount the dream. She has had a similar dream on multiple occasions, not of watching someone she loves fall into the glowing mass of Wolf 359 but rather falling into it _herself_. The dream had haunted her frequently during the stretch of time after her return to the Hephaestus, and now with the power of hindsight Lovelace wonders if it had been her subconscious trying to tell her what had truly happened to her. She has no conscious memories of the death of her original self, since the last thing she remembers from that life was putting herself into cryostasis after plotting the shuttle’s course back to Earth, but maybe on some level she’d always been aware of how it happened before the truth came out.

“I’m sorry,” says Lovelace. It’s a useless platitude, but it leaves her mouth anyway. “Gotta love when your brain thinks it’s fun to show you some of your worst fears in horrifying detail.”

Minkowski murmurs in agreement. She rolls back onto her side so that she faces Lovelace. “How have you handled dealing with nightmares for so long?” she asks. “If you don’t mind me asking. One or two nightmares every now and then, I can deal with that. But since we came back, it’s been… They haven’t stopped coming. Not every night, but still often enough that sometimes I don’t know what to do.”

Lovelace hesitates before responding. Ever since their return to Earth, it has been unfamiliar territory for them to frankly speak about their past and present ghosts and the nightmarish thoughts that come with them. It’s easier for them to pretend that they are living normal lives, just two women in love whose “how we met” story doesn’t involve a series of strange events on a space station and an alien doppelganger resurrection. Minkowski’s words of “That doesn’t mean we can’t talk to each other” have been playing themselves in Lovelace’s head all day, however, and just as she had admitted her desire to feel normal several hours ago, Minkowski has also taken this early morning moment to confess the previously unspoken extent of her own struggles.

“You stare down the nightmares and tell them that they can go fuck themselves,” Lovelace replies. “And you tell yourself that you’re not going to let them beat you, even if they’re hellbent on trying.”

“And it’s that easy?” says Minkowski, her question hedged in skepticism.

Lovelace gives a bitter laugh. “I never said it’s been a winning battle. But you keep going anyway. You don’t stop, you don’t look back, and you keep going.”

A brief smile crosses Minkowski’s face. The expression is probably as equally wry as Lovelace’s laughter, but it’s a smile all the same. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything less from you,” she says. “But… thank you. I know they’re just words, but I needed to hear that encouragement.”

She snuggles closer to Lovelace, and a comfortable silence falls between them. Lovelace absently continues the reassuring path of her hand across Minkowski’s body, the backs of her knuckles brushing against the fabric of the sleeve of her T-shirt before moving across the skin of her forearm. Outside the window, the dark cover of night has transformed into the faint blue hue that precedes the bright sunlight. It won’t be long until the sun properly rises, and while she has the opportunity Lovelace intends to watch an Earthen sunrise in its full glory.

She gets out of bed and stretches her body long, her arms reaching high and her hands interlacing together as she rises onto the balls of her feet. A yawn threatens to overtake her, but she does not let it.

Minkowski frowns at the empty space in the bed that she has left behind. “Where are you going?” she asks.

“Come with me,” is all that Lovelace says in response.

“Isabel--”

“Come on,” Lovelace repeats in encouragement. “It’s not like either of us are going to fall back asleep right away. So we might as well do _something_.”

Minkowski gets out of bed with no further objections. She follows Lovelace out of the bedroom and through the house until they reach the front door. Minkowski raises her eyebrows in curiosity when Lovelace unlocks the door and holds it open so that she can pass through it. Once they are both out of the house and in the slight chill of the early morning air, Lovelace sits down on the front steps and gestures for Minkowski to join her. The surface of the steps is damp from the remnants of rain. It must have rained at some point during the night when Lovelace had been asleep, and the evidence shows itself in the wet streets and sidewalks and the glistening drops of dew on the grass.

“You still haven’t explained why we’re out here,” Minkowski says once she has settled herself beside Lovelace.

“It helps clear my head to be outside in the middle of the night,” replies Lovelace. “Or early morning. Mostly nights. It’s a… It’s a quieter world than the daytime is. Easier for me to handle.”

“Mm. I see why. It’s definitely peaceful, I’ll give you that.”

A shiver passes through Minkowski’s body, and Lovelace puts an arm around her to warm her with her body heat. She leans her head against Minkowski’s shoulder and exhales deeply. The air around her carries the crisp, fresh scent that comes after the rain. Over the horizon partially blocked by houses and trees, the orange glow of sunrise peeks through the clouds. Its light turns the clouds a shade of cotton candy pink that contrasts against the lightening blue of the sky.

“Sun’s coming up,” Minkowski notes. “God, I can’t even remember the last time I sat somewhere and just watched the sun rise. Not since…”

Her words trail off into silence. Their hands find their way into each other’s grasp, their fingers interweaving into a tight hold. Lovelace is sure they must look strange to the car that drives down the street if its driver happens to glance their way: two women sitting on the front steps of their house at five-thirty in the morning in their pajamas, their eyes turned toward the horizon. The familiar sense of fear rises inside Lovelace-- _What if that person looks at me and knows what I am?_ \--but she pushes it away. In the quiet early morning air, that fear feels smaller and less overpowering, and so it is easy for Lovelace to stomp it down with a decisive rebuttal of _Fuck that, you’re still you_. A surge of triumph comes with the affirmation. Maybe it won’t last long, maybe in a few hours there will be something new that makes her doubt her place here on Earth, but for now, it is a triumph.

“It’s beautiful,” she says to Minkowski as the first rays of sunlight filter through the trees, their light catching on the lingering drops of rainwater that cling to the leaves.

“Yeah,” Minkowski replies. “It sure is.”

The sun continues on its path, and in this fleeting moment, with her hand entwined in Minkowski’s and the calm landscape of the morning surrounding them, Lovelace is home.


End file.
